Alberto Giacometti Biography
Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo di Stampa, 10 October 1901 – Chur, 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter and engraver. Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo di Stampa, in the Canton of Grigioni (Switzerland), on 10 October 1901 to Giovanni Giacometti, a Swiss post-impressionist painter, and Annetta Stampa, a Swiss descendant of Italian Protestant refugees. Giacometti began drawing, painting and sculpting at a very young age. Among other things, he often painted portraits of his cousin Zaccaria Giacometti, later a well-known professor of public law at the University of Zurich, who lived with him as his "big brother". After attending the School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva in 1919, he enrolled in Émile-Antoine Bourdelle's sculpture courses in Paris, at the Academy of the Grande Chaumière in 1922. Disparate cultural experiences oriented his artistic activity in different directions. this years. His drawings, characterized by the cubist, analytical crushing of every detail, and sculptures testify to this. Examples are Torso from 1925, and Spoon Woman (at the Kunsthaus in Zurich) which, on the basis of a work of memory, intend to bring to light the conceptual essence of things. In 1928 Giacometti joined the surrealist group (with which he broke up in 1935, although he participated in exhibitions until 1938). In this period, imagination and, often, the unconscious prevail over working by heart, leading Giacometti to the creation of very important sculptures for the surrealist idea of objects with a symbolic function: Man and Woman, (Paris), and Boule pendu (Suspended Sphere, 1930, Kunsthaus Zurich): an oscillating spherical shape that touches an elongated half-moon inside an iron cage, introduces the problem of space and its delimitation, which has since become clear as a constant of research Giacometti's aesthetics. In the sculptures of the early 1930s, some elements recur that constitute the interpretative key: allusions to anatomical parts and sexual organs, placed in a dialectical relationship with the linear and geometric structures within which they are inserted (Gabbia, 1931, Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Palazzo to 4 a.m., Museum of Modern Art, New York). The use of the Gabbia poses the idea of sculpture as a transparent construction, a plastic correspondent to the illusionistic space of painting. The same theme and the same key elements appear in the drawings of Objecti mobili e muti from 1931, disturbing shapes as they are difficult to identify, as Giacometti himself wrote. His work in the following years tends to close the surrealist parenthesis. The invisible object represents a point of reference: the parallelepiped on which the woman rests and the frame behind her prefigure the structuring of many of his subsequent pictorial works, in which the same delimitation of space reappears to frame the images. During the decade he worked in seclusion, still dealing mainly with sculpture. His interest shifts from myth and dream to the direct observation of reality, which is accompanied by a more conscious concern for materials and techniques and implies a notable stylistic transformation that leads him to a sort of schematic naturism (Le mele sul buffet, 1937, Museum of Modern Art in New York). In 1947 he resumed painting and drawing intensely, continuing to work from life. The favorite themes, few and continually revisited, are family members (his mother and brother Diego), the objects that surround him, landscapes seen and experienced. The figures are fixed, rigidly frontal: the frame that Giacometti builds around them has the function of distancing them, isolating them from space, creating emptiness around them. It is close to existentialist problems; it is no coincidence that Sartre was an attentive interpreter of his painting, who understood the references to the inaccessibility of objects and the distances existing between men. The stylistic tool chosen to translate the appearances of visible reality into images is, in painting, a sign that thickens and thins out to express the web of relationships between objects and with each other in the surrounding space, while in sculpture apparently lumps of matter shapeless coagulate along fundamental lines of force. The exhibition Giacometti et les Etrusques was set up (Pinacotheque de Paris, Paris, 16 September 2011 – 8 January 2012) on how Etruscan sculpture (e.g. Shadow of the Evening, Guarnacci Etruscan Museum, Volterra) influenced Giacometti's work.
